UFC 165's Alexander Gustafsson once rocked, but now rolling

From Stockholm to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, roughly 3,000 miles, Alexander Gustafsson crammed his 6-5 frame into a coach seat. And for what?

This, among other things, weighed on Gustafsson’s mind after his first and only loss as a professional MMA fighter.

It was the 10th fight of his career, his second in the UFC. He went up against former NCAA Division I national wrestling champion Phil Davis in April 2010. He got taken down, overpowered and then submitted with a choke late in the first round.

He barely had a chance to work up a decent sweat.

Afterward, Davis went to exchange the typical postfight courtesies with Gustafsson. Though he never expected Gustafsson to be happy about losing, he was surprised by just how despondent his opponent was.

“He was taking the loss extremely hard,” Davis told USA TODAY Sports and MMAjunkie.com. “Some guys, they don’t believe in themselves enough to begin with, so when they lose, it doesn’t hurt nearly as bad. But he was just really upset. And the thing that stood out about him was that, even though he was super upset, he was still himself, still genuinely sincere.”

Gustafsson is the first to admit he’s “a really bad loser.”

The loss to Davis was particularly rough in part because it was his first in MMA but also because it exposed a gap between himself and the top light heavyweights in the UFC, he says. Simply put, he needed to get better.

So when Davis and his coach, Eric Del Fierro, invited Gustafsson to Chula Vista, Calif., to train at the Alliance MMA gym with them, he couldn’t say yes fast enough.

Turns out that’s when things started to get a lot better. Gustafsson showed up at Alliance 10 weeks before his next UFC bout against Cyrille Diabate. He won that fight and the next five.

That’s how Gustafsson (15-1 MMA, 7-1 UFC) finds himself here, as the UFC’s top light heavyweight contender headed into the biggest fight of his life. He takes on 205-pound champion Jon Jones (18-1 MMA, 12-1 UFC) at UFC 165 at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre on Saturday (pay-per-view, 10 p.m. ET).

If not for his move to Chula Vista to work with Davis, Del Fierro and the rest of the crew at Alliance, things might have turned out very differently for the 26-year-old Swede. The way Del Fierro remembers it,

Gustafsson showed up for his first training camp already in great shape.

“I would have felt comfortable putting him in a fight the day he got here,” Del Fierro says.

The only thing lacking, he says, was Gustafsson’s mental game.

“He always had the skill,” Del Fierro says. “It was just the belief that he needed.

“Walking into a room with a lot of veterans and doing well, it raised his confidence level right away. The way he was performing in the gym changed within a week.”

Even Davis noticed an immediate difference between the Gustafsson he sparred with and the one he’d beaten in Abu Dhabi.

“In our fight, you didn’t get to see how good he really is,” Davis says. “When I started training with him, I immediately thought, ‘Man, it’s a good thing I didn’t stand up with this guy for too long.’ He’s a monster. Things really could have gone wrong for me.”

The biggest eye-opener for Gustafsson came when he saw how his U.S. counterparts approached their training. In the small MMA scene in Sweden, Gustafsson always had gotten by on talent and natural ability.

“The main thing I learned in San Diego was I can’t do this and compete with the best guys in the world if I’m just doing MMA as a hobby,” Gustafsson says. “It has to be my job. Since that camp, it has been.”

But despite Gustafsson’s rapid growth and six-fight winning streak, there aren’t many experts who are giving him much of a chance against the dominant champion. Jones is heavily favored by oddsmakers, many of whom list Gustafsson as a 5-1 underdog in the bout.

Del Fierro sees it as a natural consequence of Jones’ unimpeachable title run, which has already seen him dispatch four former UFC champs with little apparent difficulty.

“That guy, anybody you put him up against doesn’t get much credit,” Del Fierro says.

That’s fine with Gustafsson. The laconic challenger isn’t hurt by being overlooked, nor is he even all that surprised. Other people might not believe in him, he says, but that’s no longer a problem he suffers from.

“To me, the only thing that matters is who has worked the hardest and who wants that belt more,” Gustafsson says. “I know it’s me, and I will take that belt.”

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